“There’s a creative freedom that comes from knowing any change we make can be easily reverted by naysayers.”
– Motion Twin 2D artist Gwenaël Massé talks about how setting up an archive has affected the development process.
The folks at Motion Twin made the call last year to release a full archive of all past Dead Cells versions on Steam, and allow players to pick-and-choose which version from the game’s Early Access and post-launch period they’d like to play.
Doing so has, as Motion Twin’s Gwenaël Massé now explains on VentureBeat, found a comfortable, player-pleasing compromise that allows the game to continue to evole without wiping out player-preferred balance changes or features of the past, while also making live easier for the dev team as well.
“There’s an old adage, Chesterton’s Fence, that essentially states that if you come across a fence you should figure out why it’s there before tearing it down,” writes Massé. “The same goes for game development. It helps to know why you made certain decisions before changing them again, and the archive’s allowed us to check our own work, trace a line between past and present — even settle disputes, on a few occasions.”
There’s tons more from Massé in the full story on VentureBeat, including some developer-to-developer tips for setting up a public build archive, as well as other notes on how doing so has impacted both the team and the community helping to inform Dead Cells’ ongoing development.